


(in this maze) you can lose your way

by kirargent



Series: Triwizard-Tron [4]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Harry Potter Setting, Alternate Universe - Hogwarts, M/M, Triwizard Tournament
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-11
Updated: 2019-05-11
Packaged: 2020-03-01 05:59:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18794383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kirargent/pseuds/kirargent
Summary: Hunk’s eyebrows draw together, pained. “No way, man. If you hadn’t distracted that spider, I wouldn’t have made it to the Cup.”Lance waves a hand. “You saved my ass in here earlier. We’re even. Take it.”





	(in this maze) you can lose your way

**Author's Note:**

> she's done! only took me a couple of years! [peace sign emoji]
> 
> i'm too lazy to incorporate it but it's important to note that pidge 100% helped grow the hedge maze for the third challenge. we stan a slytherin who's good at herbology.
> 
> anyways peace out voltron i heard your last few seasons were w i l d

“Hunk, I swear to fuck—”

“Stupefy!” Hunk shouts.

“Just get the Cup alread—”

“Stupefy! Impedimenta!”

“Stupefy!” Hunk and Lance shout together. The giant spider goes stiff—its grip on Lance loosens. He falls. It falls after him. He rolls to the side, rolls—

The spider’s huge body lands partly on his leg and he hisses “ _Fuck!_ ”

“You okay, buddy?” Hunk asks; he’s coming closer.

Lance says, “Ow. M’fine.” His lower leg is a hot messy burn of pain. Broken? Lance keeps his face calm, growls, “Go get the Cup, dude.”

Hunk’s eyebrows draw together, pained. “No way, man. If you hadn’t distracted that spider, I wouldn’t have made it to the Cup.”

Lance waves a hand. “You saved my ass in here earlier. We’re even. Take it.”

Hunk shakes his head. “You helped me out on the second challenge, too. I would’ve been way behind if you hadn’t tipped me off about the egg.”

“That wasn’t fair in the first place!” Lance rolls his eyes. “That challenge was like, so much my shit that it wouldn’t have even been fun if I hadn’t helped you out. I had a huge unfair advantage for that one.”

“And you should’ve won that challenge, putting me even farther behind. Come on, we all know Sendak being a dick is the only reason you didn’t come in first place plus extra cred in the second challenge.”

Lance grits his teeth. His leg is mcfreaking killing him. That stupid spider probably fractured his damn ankle.

“Hunk, my dude? Please just take the win.”

Hunk says, “No,” walking over to Lance and leaning down to grab him by the upper arm. He hauls a hissing Lance to his feet and begins guiding him down the hedge corridor toward the goblet.

“If you think I’m taking this from you, you’re delusional, buddy,” Lance informs him, hobbling with half his weight on Hunk.

Hunk rolls his eyes. “Uh huh.”

“I’m serious!”

Hunk huffs. “I know you are. Tie, then?” He stops, looking at Lance hopefully.

“No way! That Cup is yours, dude!”

“A tie, then,” Hunk says, more decisively.

Lance is opening his mouth, gearing up to really argue, but this is of course when Keith, with his perfect sense of timing, whips around a corner of hedge, hair wild and sticking to his sweaty forehead, a slice across his cheekbone glistening sharp red.

“Don’t!” Keith yells.

“Tie!” Lance agrees. They don’t have time to argue.

Together, he and Hunk close the last yards to the Cup, Lance hopping on one foot more than limping, Hunk shouldering like, most of Lance’s weight.

Keith is sprinting. “Listen to me I swear to Flamel don’t touch it it’s a—!”

“ _Hey!_ ” Lance hisses as a hand curls around his good ankle even as his own fingers are grasping the left-side handle of the Cup—

And then he swallows his voice as the ground begins lurching and he’s being tugged into outer space by the stomach.

Hunk’s shoulders are broad and solid and warm under his arm; Keith’s finger’s are a vice at his ankle. Everything else is a jumbled, ephemeral smear of meaningless lights and colors, nothingness spinning beneath his feet.

As they’re slammed against a cold dirt ground who the fuck knows where, Keith finishes his sentence.

“—Trap.”

Lance scowls. “You don’t say.”

Keith picks himself up, swipes at the dirt on his face. His mouth pinches as his glove scrapes the open cut on his cheek. “You should’ve listened.”

Lance rolls his eyes, but Keith isn’t paying attention to him anymore—is looking around them now, taking in…

Well. Lance doesn’t know what, exactly.

“Hey, uh.” Lance licks his suddenly dry lips. “The fuck is going on?”

Hunk shakes his head, eyes wide. The Cup hangs forgotten in his right hand. “I’m gonna send a patronus to Hog—”

But the cloaked figure turns, wand lifted, and Hunk’s wand goes flying. Then so does Lance’s, and Keith’s.

Keith yells in frustration—and fucking charges.

Fear pierces through Lance’s chest like an arrow. He scowls, barely has time to say “Keith—!” before the figure flicks their wand and Keith’s body flies through the air to crumple at the foot of a tree.

The trees here are bare-limbed, craggly brushstrokes against a dark sky, a very effective spooky backdrop to the fucking graveyard they’re in.

“Keith, bud!” Hunk yells even as Lance shouts, “ _Hey!_ ”

Keith stirs; groans.

Lance limps quickly sideways, trying to edge around the cloaked figure to catch them off guard. From the corner of his eye he sees Hunk creep towards their wands lying nearby in the dirt. A freezing charm locks Lance’s joints, stops him dead, and topples him sideways. He tries to yell; his voice doesn’t leave his throat.

From this angle he can no longer see the cloaked figure, nor the weird purple-glowing tank with a body in it.

He can still see Hunk. Heart stuck in his throat along with his voice, he watches Hunk throw himself to the ground to avoid the blue flash of a spell. Hunks fingers curl—he has their wands! He doesn’t even try to dodge the next spell. He flings out his arm; the wands fly toward Lance, who reflexively tries to flinch but can’t. One of the wands hits his stomach, then falls. A firework of blue hits Hunk in the shoulder and he goes statue-still.

The hand on Lance’s shoulder startles him. When Keith hisses under his breath, “ _It’s me_ ,” Lance is grateful that the immobilization curse prevented him from yelping and punching Keith in the nose.

Keith picks up Hunk’s wand and murmurs a countercharm, repeats the charm in Hunk’s direction.

Freed, Lance barely gets out “Thanks,” before Keith is on his feet, moving backwards, slipping back towards the shadowy tree line.

Hunk hisses “Keith,  _don’t_ ,” and Lance grabs for his wand from the ground, and Keith growls, “This is our chance to take out _Zarkon_.”

Haggar’s cloak falls from her head as she turns, flinging a curse at Keith that he dodges with those stupid-fast reflexes.

“Keith, _no_.” Hunk’s voice is strained with fear.

“Stupefy! Petrificus Totalus!”

Haggar counters Lance’s spells almost before he’s even cast them, her mouth a thin smile. “‘Take out’ Zarkon? Nothing will stop the Dark Lord’s return.”

“Keith, we’re getting out of here,” Hunk says, voice weirdly calm. “This is insane. We’re leaving before we _die_ out here.”

Keith is hidden from sight somewhere in the trees. Haggar flicks her wrist and lights that shit on fire.

Lance tenses, waiting for Keith to emerge.

He gets to his knees, glances at Hunk, who’s taken Haggar’s momentary distraction to run a few paces closer and scoop up Keith’s lost wand. Lance catches his eye. Lance whispers, “ _Glacius_ ,” watching Hunk mouth a spell of his own.

And fuck, Haggar deflects their spells _way_ too easily.

Hunk is right: they’re completely outmatched. They either get outta here ASAP, or Lance doesn’t see how they get through this alive.

“ _Incarcerous_ ,” she says, almost lazily. Ropes appear from nowhere and twist around Hunk’s arms, his throat, one winding around his skull to gag him.

 _Damn_ it, where is Keith? They’ve gotta _go!_

“Come on!”

Speak of the fucking devil, there he is, sprinting from the treeline from the opposite direction they all expected him from. Haggar shrieks a curse. Lance hurls himself forwards, throwing his body at Keith before the curse can land.

He hits Keith sideways, an elbow bruising his sternum, his wrist slamming too hard into the ground as he falls on top of Keith, Keith’s shoulder jabbing his chest.

“Let’s go let’s go let’s go—grab Hunk, grab his arm—”

Keith stretches to grip Hunk’s shoulder; Haggar yells another curse but Lance has already cried “ _Accio!_ ” and the Cup sails through the air, hits his palm—the world twists and shatters.

Lance hits grass face-first. Pain bursts in his nose. He struggles to push himself up, to sit on his knees. But ow, _ow,_ that doesn’t work, his ankle is too fucked; he collapses sideways, dazed with pain, supporting himself on one hand with his feet kicked out to the side. He blinks.

There’s a roar from the stands full of spectators that buzzes dully in his ears. The sky is a pretty dark blue color, and star-spattered. Lance feels vaguely like he’s dreaming. He focuses on the hot throb of his right ankle; he mumbles a countercharm to free Hunk from the ropes still twined around him.

Keith shoves hair back from his forehead, sitting up, the cut on his cheek bleeding freely. His jaw is clenched in a hard, tight line.

“We couldn’t have stopped him,” Lance says. “We couldn’t have beat her.”

Keith’s jaw clamps tighter. He knows Lance is right, probably; knows that even if Hunk and Lance hadn’t been right in Haggar’s line of fire, he still wouldn’t have succeeded on his own. Stubborn fuck still would’ve tried, though.

Lance feels suddenly dizzy with relief that they’d all been there together. What if it had been just Hunk? Just Keith? He feels cold from the inside out.

He shakes his head as if to clear it, which doesn’t work. “What _was_ that?”

Keith shrugs, shakes his head, opens his mouth but doesn’t say anything.

Hunk sits up on Keith’s other side, groaning and rubbing at his arms where there are mild red abrasions from the ropes.

Keith sighs. “Okay, so yesterday I saw Haggar take the Cup into the maze. But that didn’t seem that weird, right? But then this morning I overheard…” His eyes narrow and he stops talking. Lance follows his gaze.

Allura is walking quickly towards them, her expression carefully blank, a small group of other headmasters and professors a short distance behind her.

“Is everyone all right?” she asks upon reaching them, brows pinched together as her eyes scan the three of them.

Keith says, “We need to talk.”

 

“Zarkon is back,” Allura says, when Keith’s told them everything. It’s not a question; she’s not really looking for confirmation.

It’s just the four of them in an empty classroom, silencing charms keeping their conversation private from the outside world.

Keith nods. “Or, he will be. Soon.”

Allura sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose and closing her eyes. “Well,” she says. She doesn’t say anything else.

Lance shifts his weight awkwardly, only using his right ankle for a split second that’s still enough to make his vision flash white. Hunk nudges a chair towards him. Lance gives him a tight smile, doesn’t sit, crosses his arms over his chest. Anxiety swirls hot inside his ribcage.

Keith's jaw is still tight. "You said you knew something?" 

Allura nods, her own jaw clenching briefly. "Yes. Nyma overheard—"

"Merlin's beard, is she still sneaking around?"

Allura silences Hunk with a look. "Nyma overheard a conversation between Sendak and Haggar once you three had entered the maze, before Haggar left the grounds. It sounded as though something was designed to go awry upon completion of the third task." Allura exhales carefully, folding her hands together. Lance can see that they're shaking ever so slightly.

"It was intended to send a message to us. To the schools. The taking of our Tournament Champion—it was a message that we are a target. The next generation of young wizards is being threatened."

“Um,” Hunk says. He drums his fingers on the edge of the long classroom desk behind him. His fingers still; he sits on the edge of the desk, swinging his feet. “So she was gonna take us to prove a point, and…” He frowns. “And _then_ what?”

Keith shrugs.

Allura chews her lower lip.

Hunk gulps. “Okay, I don’t know if that means kill us or torture us, but I’m not super psyched about either option, so. Yeah.” He looks at Lance. “Thanks for getting us out of there, buddy.”

Lance shrugs. He still doesn’t really feel anchored in his body. It feels like part of his stomach is still floating around in liminal space with the fricking Portkey, or something. “Team effort,” he says, truthfully.

Allura sets her mouth in a firm line, her eyes hardening. "As everything must be as we move forward. We must work together if we're to have any hope of defeating Zarkon."

Lance says, tone mild, "Woo hoo." He pumps a fist half-heartedly.

Hunk gives him a weak smile.

Allura rolls her eyes.

From beside him, Keith gives him a shove—but his hand is quick to grasp Lance's bicep to steady him when he nearly loses his balance on his one good ankle. Lance feels a little more centered in his body. He gives Keith a half-hearted smirk.

"We're a good team," he says to his friends, meaning it. "We might even win this thing."

The way Allura's face looks torn between amusement and exasperation; the warm way that Hunk grins at him; the way Keith's gloved hand lingers on his arm: all of it makes him feel a little lighter, a little more normal, a little less like the world is about to end.

They really, he thinks, just might have a shot at this.

Besides, he's pretty sure he could talk a certain  _dragon_ into joining their side, so like. Come on. They've totally got this.

 

 


End file.
